Longtime tech worker organizers Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan’s new book, Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry, draws on the authors’ experiences at major tech companies to chronicle the rise and fall of the tech worker movement, its early victories, and the repression and slide to corporate control that followed.
“Over the course of the 2010s, what we saw was that the tech industry wasn’t quite the industry that it had promised to its workers and to the public. Rather than making the world more open, more democratic, we saw it really be the culprit of misinformation,” says Tan, who was pushed out of Microsoft after raising objections to the company’s ties to fossil fuel companies.
Silicon Valley’s slide to the right was influenced by corporate backlash to labor’s demands, explains Redwine, who was fired from Kickstarter for union organizing. She says she hopes to inspire a new generation of tech workers to organize “within these tech oligarchs’ own empires, to stand up and push back.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.